The gel packs formed the basis of the bio-neural circuitry, which was essentially an organic computer system. The packs contained neural fibers surrounded in a blue gel with metallic interfaces on the top and bottom. They helped store more information and operated at faster speeds than isolinear circuitry.

The fibers in an individual gel pack were capable of making billions of connections, thus generating an incredibly sophisticated and responsive computing architecture. This kind of organic circuitry allowed computers to "think" in very similar ways to living organisms; by using "fuzzy logic", they could effectively operate by making a "best guess" answer to complex questions rather than working through all possible calculations. This was due in part to the inherent ability of organic neural systems to correlate chaotic patterns that eluded the capacities of conventional hardware.

Gel packs could be modified by injecting chroniton-infused serum into the packs in order to return a ship caught in numerous temporal periods, such as caused by a temporal anomaly, to a single temporal period. This process returned the ship to a few seconds before the anomaly occurred. (VOY: "Shattered")

In The Q Continuum trilogy, it was revealed that the USS Enterprise-E also possessed the gel packs. During the story, Reginald Barclay discovered that the gel packs were capable of absorbing the psionic energy of the galactic barrier, prompting him to suggest that the crew channel the resulting energy into the Enterprise's shields so that they could increase the time that they could remain in the barrier when attempting to hide from the Calamarain.